Rethinking Enterprise-Class Consumer Tech

SAN JOSE, CA  These days, enterprise technology tends to be analogous with "office tech." This association needs to stop, according Christopher Fine, vice president of Goldman, Sachs & Company's Global Technology Division.

Instead, enterprise technology should be conceived of more as "consumer technology," Fine said at Tuesday's VON Conference in San Jose, adding that there's a huge, untapped market opportunity for vendors who are starting to think this way.

For the purposes of his talk, Fine defined enterprise consumer technology as technology that empowers employees.

"Enterprise-class consumer tech does not intrude upon or limit the employees ability to function as a consumer and fulfill the enterprise's needs for security and functionality," Fine said.

What it does do is enable employees to use the devices (laptops, cell phones, etc.) they would normally use as a consumer, but in the workspace. Fine admitted that this would be a challenging, but potentially lucrative, endeavor nevertheless.

Today's office environment is defined by a number of dramatic changes, Fine explained during his talk. Over the past 10 years, everything from hardware to software has changed dramatically, and so too has the employee.

Increasingly, employees of Fortune 1000 companies are becoming more and more diverse and mobile, Fine said. They are working remotely with greater frequency not only because they can, but because their jobs require it.

Furthermore, they also tend to be more tech savvy, Fine said. And it is this high-end consumer/employee hybridsomeone that is technically in between the corporation and the consumerthat can and should be regarded as a new attractive source of revenue for vendors.

"If you address [employees] in their work role, providing them with things like secure access at home, there's a little bit more flexibility and also huge market potential," Fine said, making explicit reference to the BlackBerry as a successful example of this way of thinking.

"The margins all across the food chain are phenomenal for the BlackBerry," he said. "It's a centrally-managed, prosumer device that's highly secure and available almost globally."

The workplace too has changed, according to Fine, and has gone from monolithic to mosaic.

"One size doesn't fit all anymore," he said. "The world is now the workplace and mobile information is becoming richer and richer. If you'd looked 10 years ago, you'd never have seen all these pieces. If you look today, you have the enterprise, clients, employees, affiliates, partnersand all the ways they interact and fit together."

It's a complex picture, Fine said of this new "seamless world of IT." "And if you don't think the home is an IT environment, look again. Offices, networksmany of today's home resemble workspaces, at least in terms of equipment, to an amazing degree."

"Why is enterprise a growing segment for carriers?" Fine asked rhetorically. "Wireless data. From a service provider point of view, the growth is in the ways to touch the individual."

//Related Articles

And with IT spending showing low growth, there is a marked opportunity to tie spending to consumer technology spending by creating solutions for mobile employees.

"The workplace is changing in fundamental ways, which helps drive the need for more robust employee technology," Fine concluded. And if companies can start becoming more functionally focused on things like remote work, network access, voice, and multimedia, they stand to reap the benefits.

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service